Everything hurt and snow soaked through my pants to my legs.  A path snaked through the white from her house to the curtain of fog hanging over the world.  The only hint of a street beyond was the whistling of the wind.

Frigid air breathed down my neck and pinched my bones, but the cold long since gave way to nothing.  No one was out, and I couldn’t shake the thought of the entire ball of the earth being frozen, down to the fiery core.

The wood door shivered in the cold, standing vigil over those warm inside.  When it saw me come close, it stopped shaking and stood tall to intimidate me.  One hand held the shovel, like a kung-fu bow staff ready to pounce, and the other knocked.  The shivering started again, like the door couldn’t deal with me and the snow at the same time.

Her mom appeared in the doorway with burning eyes.  “Done already?”  She looked past me to the path.  I didn't rush, even went a little slow.  She was the over-friendly type, like most moms, and didn’t know not to talk to me just because her daughter didn’t.  All she saw was a kid who never came over anymore.  I wonder why.  

She turned and yelled into the house.  “Skyler!”  After a few seconds, she padded down the stairs and stood at the bottom, arms crossed.  Our eyes met and held for a little.  Eyebrows arched into each other, bunching the skin in between, and her lips pushed inward.  Her arm, covered in polkadot pajamas, picked at the blonde hair knotted in a bird’s nest bun on her head.  There was no one to impress, because she cut everyone off.  

I didn’t recognize her without headphones.  Monkey ears, we called them.  She always wore them now, and walked through the halls glaring at everyone instead of talking.  Whispers said she listened to nothing but static all day.  Not sure what buzzing noise had over friends, but she ignored us all the same.  We kept our distance, and she kept hers.  

After the snow melted and froze again, her mom spoke.  “Must be cold. Come in, come in.“  The woman’s mouth curled up on both ends, but not in the middle.  She motioned inside and grabbed my shoulder.  Skyler shook her head and looked at the ground.  My arms were water, and besides, her mom didn’t give me a choice.  Her daughter couldn’t be alone forever.  She forgot, or didn’t know, how Skyler did this to herself.

On the sitting-room wall hung a collage of pictures, but one poked me until I looked.  An older man and a little girl with golden hair climbed a waterfall together.  They held hands and the man, whose hairline was a waning tide, looked at her with admiration.  He laughed at something she said, and she beamed.  The sun glinted off the rushing water, and warmed them instead of blinding.  It was one of those images you’re not sure you remember, or have seen pictures so often they turn to memories.

The mug scalded my hands because of their new normal, but I sat in silence.  The plush couch cushions were imbedded with laughing children playing cards and making jokes, and no matter how much she tried to scrub us out there we stayed.  Even listening to the sound in between radio channels wasn’t enough, too long had we all been together.  

Being there like this, forced by her mother, was an awful distortion of the return to normalcy I prayed for.  The quicker I drank the hot chocolate the quicker this ended, but every sip was swallowing a volcano.

“Ice cubes?”  Even from across the room she noticed how high the liquid splashed, because I blew waves.  She was trying to pretend everything was how it should be.  I saw right through her and her trembling voice.

My head nodded for me.  Even if it was just smalltalk, the drink was too hot.  Outside in the whipping wind inside was heaven, but inside the whipping wind was.  Always out of reach.

The clear boxes of not-glass dropped into the mug and turned brown.  They bobbed up and down, and stayed still.  The liquid slithered tentacles into them and massaged until they shriveled to nothing.  Relief flooded my veins.  The core of the planet was still an inferno, even if encased in ice.

“Haven’t heard you talk in a while.”  Images of her eating lunch under the stairs alone wandered into my vision.  We said the monkey ears were fused to her head when she popped from the womb, even though we all remembered when they weren’t.  Usually we didn’t talk about her, just thought about how she shattered her life and chipped ours.  At least I did.  The others might have forgotten, hurt so bad they had to block her out.

“Prefer music more,”  Her voice used to be music.  She didn’t listen to nothing, just songs like the rest of us.  We imagined because we didn’t know, and now I did.  “Not as real.”  Or she was into Beethoven and thought she didn’t need human contact.  Some say long-dead artists feel like friends, especially after heartbreak.  They weren’t real people, even though they used to be.  She couldn’t live her whole life in fake connection, no matter how raw.

“We always thought you listened to static.“  The whispers were ridiculous now.  Once she cut us off we did it back because we couldn’t see past her hurting us.

An ocean raged before me, and she was a speck on the opposite shore.  Over her hung a dark cloud, billowing up in smoke signals.  We blockaded her island so she couldn’t leave.  She shouldn’t have gone in the first place.  The waves tugged at me to swim to her, and promised to stay warm through my journey.

“I heard the rumors,”  She nodded her head parallel with the floor, and looked out the window.  They didn’t bother her, because if they did she would try to be normal.  Last year, she cut off your head if you talked behind her back.  “Would do the same good as music, but I’d go crazy.”  Any sound was a boundary to hide behind, but constant buzzing let in more of herself, which she ran from as much as from others.

“Not crazy yet?”  No thought formed the words, just a Muse forcing my tongue.  After they were out of my mouth, I tried to knock them in a different direction so they didn’t hit her.  She was cracked enough.

Her cheeks clumped up over her eyes and her hyena laugh echoed off the walls, and ripped a hole in the ongoing blank canvas outside.  Through the fog, a strand of golden light shined into the snow-crusted window and onto the wolfskin carpet between us.  For a moment everything was back in place.  I fancied all those months since the summer were a dream, and the world was alright.  After gulps of breath, her cheeks came off her eyes, and only tugged on her lips enough to speak.  

“Would be, without the…you know…“  She clamped her hands on her ears.  Monkey ears.  I saw them through five crooked cell-bars each, and knew no amount of noise kept her from thinking about him.

“But just because he left doesn’t mean…we could help you.”  Except her heart wasn’t molten rock like Earth’s, just regular old rock deep where light couldn’t touch.  No matter how much I dug, I couldn’t get in because she sat in a cave at the bottom of the world and hissed at the sun.  She buried herself in a pit of fear.

“Don’t want anyone else to leave.”   The words zigzagged out like a child drawing letters.  He lied to her the whole time, saying he cared about their family.  Or worse, he did care, but then stopped.  When he left he took her faith in people with him, because if he didn't stay by her side, no one would.  When a slippery rock gives way and you fall, you don’t want to climb another waterfall.

“He never left. You gotta let go.”  I almost saw him, shackled in the corner of the room, as she mourned him like he was dead.  Neither acknowledged the other, but each reached out for attention, he to be set free, and she to bring him back.  Both suffered, and knew not why.

Maybe she saw him too, because her hands quaked.  The mug slipped from them and shattered on the carpet.  The clink resounded off the pictures, and grew into a boom.  Hot chocolate sizzled over her, and a scream stopped in her throat.  Instead of stains, I saw her drowning in churning lava and crying for the ice to come back.  With heat came chaos.  In cold, everything was quiet.

I reached down to the core to pull her out, but she got up and went to the kitchen.  “Napkins.”  Standing in the middle of the room with my intact mug was wrong, but I couldn’t move.  

From across the ocean, I heard her arguing with her mom, but the little girl in the picture caught my eye, and everything fell away.  She wouldn’t wear headphones for many years, and she smiled at the camera with one thumb up and one in the man’s grasp.  No, she smiled through the camera at me.  I smiled back, and motioned for her to keep climbing up.  There was a river on top, with roses and daffodils and dandelions of every color running alongside.

When Skyler came back, her cheeks shined with dry tears.  “You should go.”  Gone was the trembling, replaced by choking.  She was content with white noise, and didn’t need someone coming in to ruin everything.  When I left, the monkey ears would be drilled back on, and Beethoven or static or it didn’t matter what would reign.  They would pull her further from us, but she was safe because they drowned out memories too.

“You can’t keep hiding.”  Blood rushed to my face, and I almost yelled.  She was a cat-lady in the making, but she could be happy.  He was off living, while she sat waiting for him to come through the door, like a panting dog.  A dog-lady.  We needed her and her couch and the cards.  I needed her.  

“I’m not hiding.”  Snot manifested on a reindeer nose, and she wiped her face on her sleeve with a slurp.  In school I would turn to my friends and snicker, but I felt a thousand years old, and had heard every joke.  She pulled up the moat and locked the gates because the last one she trusted stabbed her in the back.  Too bad for all the standup citizens who wanted peaceful free trade with her castle.  Safety came first. 

“Come back.”  The world blurred, and I only saw the speck across the sea.  My chest contracted over and over, and I couldn’t stop the clogged up feelings from being wrung out as tears.  There were more than I imagined, and I didn’t recognize some.  We needed her with us.   I was lost without her.  She was the glue, the map, the leader, all sorts of jobs she wasn’t following through on.  I tried to tell her, but only sobs came out.

Her face was of one who needed to throw up on an empty stomach.  The tears flowed when she was in the kitchen, so now she was dry.  We looked at each other and I cried for us both.  

The napkins came in handy, catching buckets of rainfall.  When one filled up she crumpled it and added it to the pile of hot chocolate-soaked ones.  The color of paper saturated in water wasn’t like you think, not the white of dry paper nor the blue or see-through of water.  Somewhere in between it was, dark but not black.  Brown.  Or maybe it was mixed with hot chocolate.

“Everything okay in there?”  The voice bubbled in from the kitchen and I lost it.  No.  Yes and no and maybe and I don’t know.  My eyes squeezed the last drops, and my lungs played background music.  I heard the door swing open and her mother ask what happened, but I was already up by the front and wasn’t looking.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m…”  The woman said the words one after another.  You’re sorry?  I’m sorry.  I was only there to cause pain.  Who was I to cry after all she went through?  If I was a real friend she would bawl in my arms and I would comfort her.  Months of being away from her mixed everything up so nothing made sense.

The door hung open, and wind whispered from outside.  “Thank you.”  Her eyes shook in their sockets, but she stayed firm.  As I walked out, she closed the wood wall, watching me all the while so I wouldn’t stick my foot in the crack and come barging back in.  The sky shined orange through the white.  Next time I wouldn’t spend so long on a single house.  Cold wrapped me tighter now, because I was used to warm rooms.  Bundled in my coat, the numbness was better than smashed cups and crying.  Snow was pure regardless of the hearth burning far beneath.  She had a point.

I grabbed my shovel and walked down the winding path I made into the fog.  Snow began to fall, the flurries dancing in the wind.  Soon the driveway would be covered again, and the house would be a world its own like before.

Only at dinner did I realize I never got paid.  The hot chocolate was enough.